Harsh Fates Await Four-Legged Homeless : Animals: Scandal over euthanasia method used at shelter near San Diego spotlights problems at cash-strapped humane societies. Overwork and lack of training are said to be common.

By MICHAEL GRANBERRY

Oct. 21, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ESCONDIDO — For 11 1/2 years, Susan Middleton gave lethal injections to thousands of animals that no one wanted. Her pay and training were poor, and she often felt gravely depressed. Forced to work as quickly as possible, she once euthanized 900 animals in a 30-day period.

“The worst ones were the 3-week-old kittens with big blue eyes,” she said. “They look up at you, and all you have is a great big needle. I had to keep telling myself: ‘This is not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not .’ But it was how I made my living.”

Middleton stopped making her living that way in July: She and two others were fired by the Escondido Humane Society for, among other reasons, injecting animals through the heart, a potentially brutal method of euthanasia that leaves many animals to suffer without actually killing them.

The ensuing scandal in the humane society became symbolic of the tangle of troubles facing animal-protection and animal-control agencies nationwide.

The dilemma: As money gets tighter, forcing cities into economic straitjackets, such agencies are among the first to have their budgets reduced, if not slashed altogether. Overwork and poor training--just two of the problems that plagued the humane society in this San Diego County city--are often the byproducts.

“Animal Control is consistently up against teachers, police and fire departments (for funding),” said Kim Sturla, regional director of the Fund for Animals. “So who do you think will win?”

In Los Angeles, the city’s Animal Regulation Commission earlier this month ordered an independent investigation into allegations of agency misconduct stemming from a July 3 raid to rescue about 100 abused pets.

Animal welfare activists accused the Department of Animal Regulation of foot-dragging when police and the state Humane Department requested help during a raid on a home in Glassell Park. Animal regulation officials claimed they were simply shorthanded that day and could not assist.

In San Diego, the city Humane Society, operating outside its jurisdiction, raided a home in Oceanside in which neighbors feared animals were being abused. Despite repeated calls and letters, the neighbors had been ignored by the North San Diego County Humane Society. Those officials, like their counterparts in Los Angeles, complained of not having the resources to handle the job.

Investigators found, in the words of spokesman Larry Boersma, “at least eight dead, decayed cat bodies inside the house. There was nothing left but skeletons and fur. We removed the dead bodies and impounded all the live cats we could catch.”

In Escondido, where Susan Middleton worked, the humane society convened a task force that confirmed “allegations of cruelty to animals, mismanagement and fiscal irresponsibility.”

At the center of the brouhaha was the use of the painful “intra-cardiac” technique to put unwanted animals to death.

Although such heart injections are permitted under state law, they are almost universally spurned for being ineffective and inhumane, experts say. The conventional way of euthanizing domestic animals is a foreleg injection.

The American Humane Assn. endorses only the foreleg method and recommends having it done by a board-certified veterinarian--which Middleton is not.

Middleton, who was a kennel supervisor, admits to often missing the heart and striking a rib instead.

In using that method, Escondido’s kennel staff inflicted a level of pain that bordered on torture, the task force concluded. Dozens of animals subjected to failed euthanasia were left “unattended . . . in states of partial consciousness . . . sometimes overnight,” the task force said.

Middleton, her superior and the employee who assisted her were dismissed and a new management team put in place.

Middleton said that she had been taught “no other way” than the intra-cardiac method. She said that in dismissing her, supervisors told her only that her position had been eliminated. She blamed the controversy on internal politics.

The chairman of the task force, Escondido businessman Victor Smith, said the group found the intra-cardiac method of injection on dogs particularly objectionable. “Any person with any training can usually find the vein on a dog with no problem,” he said.

Members of the animal-care community reacted with shock and outrage after word of the scandal leaked out in May.

Charlene Marriner, director of the Imperial Valley Humane Society in El Centro--which endured its own scandal in 1985, when animals were being “euthanized” with a shotgun--said the intra-cardiac method is known for its cruelty.

“If you hit a rib, the needle breaks,” said Marriner, who was hired two years after the use of a shotgun was ended. “But if you hit a lung, the animal coughs, sputters. . . . It’s incredibly painful. I hate to think how bad it would be.”

Sturla, of the Fund for Animals, agreed that Middleton was a victim of poor management.

“You take a person who’s getting a crummy salary,” she said, “not receiving sufficient training, not receiving any kind of ongoing psychological counseling and who is taking the lives of dozens of animals a week because she has to--it’s her job. You’re talking inhumanity to the person, as well as to the animal. That’s why you have such high burnout and high turnover in those positions.”

Underlining this debate is the widespread use of euthanasia.

California taxpayers pay about $100 million a year for euthanasia and other animal-related services, according to a 1991 study by the state Department of Health Services. Animal-rights activists say problems such as those in Escondido are primarily attributable to pet owners who refuse to spay and neuter their dogs and cats, contributing to a crisis in pet overpopulation.

In California, more than 800,000 dogs and cats were euthanized in 1991, the study found. The proportion of euthanized cats was especially high: Shelters statewide impounded 541,418 cats in 1991 and euthanized 412,132, or 76%.

Nationwide, the figures are even more staggering. The Fund for Animals reports that, of the country’s stray dog population, only 18.5% are claimed by owners, with the rest being euthanized; 98.5% of all stray cats are euthanized on an annual basis.

The San Diego Humane Society’s Boersma blames tight budgets for spearheading another trend: the merging of animal-control agencies with humane societies, creating a “two-headed monster” with conflicting philosophies.

“A humane society’s job is to protect animals from people,” he said. “An animal-control agency’s job is to protect people from animals. You end up with a contradictory mission, and that’s the problem.”

At the moment, animal control appears much more prevalent than animal protection.

Jane Cartmill, the spokeswoman for San Diego Animal Advocates, an animal-rights group that investigated the Escondido Humane Society, said Escondido personified the “dirty little secret” of euthanasia’s dominance nationwide.

As the funding noose tightens, “more Escondidos will result,” Cartmill said, through smaller staffs, longer hours, lower pay and even more animals showing up at the door.

Euthanasia is “the worst part of running a humane society,” said El Centro’s Marriner. “It is the biggest thing we hate and the biggest reason for burnout.”

The most she and her colleagues can do, Marriner said, is limit euthanasia to foreleg injections, given by board-certified technicians, “no matter how much time it takes.”

In the past the profession has made strides in curbing of more primitive methods. Decompression chambers were used to euthanize animals in Los Angeles and other parts of the state until 1978, when an outcry succeeded in having them outlawed.

Executive Director Dan Morrison of the Downey-based Southeast Area Animal Control Authority said his organization still uses carbon-monoxide cabinets to kill large numbers of strays.

The cabinets are loaded with dogs or cats and filled with noxious fumes, which kill them in seconds. Morrison--conceding that the cabinets create controversy--said he prefers them to one-at-a-time injections because it “puts to sleep” large numbers in less time, for less money and is easier on humans.

“It takes the personal aspect out of it,” he said of the carbon-monoxide chamber. “You just push a button and walk away.

“Our method is obviously painless,” he said. “We replace the oxygen with carbon monoxide. The animal passes out. Death occurs after that, but at least the animal is asleep when it dies.”

San Diego’s Cartmill argues that quibbling over methods overlooks the obvious point--that mass euthanasia is “a moral atrocity.”

“To breed one more dog or cat when you’re killing almost a million a year in this state alone is a crime,” she said. “Why are we so eager to accept euthanasia as the best method of handling this? Is this the best us humans can come up with?”